Reports and Analyses

By Valentina Pop

EUobserver.com

Leaders of the four largest political groups in the European Parliament on Tuesday (15 December) called for transparency and complete information about the commissioner candidates ahead of the January hearings, with the Bulgarian nominee emerging as the most controversial.

"The hearings are a very powerful tool in the hands of the Parliament to check the skills and competences of commissioner candidates," Socialist group leader Martin Schulz said at a press conference.

The competition over energy resources has reached very high levels today, with the outlook being extremely clear. This competition will evolve extremely dynamically, entailing a geopolitical reshuffling at global level and having a remarkable impact on the international order. First of all this is about the emerging economies’ increasingly hard to quench thirst, emerging economies from whose ranks China and India, which total over a third of the world’s population, indisputably stand out. Secondly, it is increasingly obvious that this competition over energy resources has become the field of a particular geopolitical dynamic. Namely, the states that are looking for energy resources are subordinating their foreign policy goals to that purpose. Thirdly, an increasingly frequent phenomenon consists of using energy resources as a foreign policy vector precisely in order to capitalize on the global competition in this domain.

Bulgaria and Romania were not ready to enter the European Union, the EU Enlargement Commissioner, Olli Rehn says.

Rehn spoke in an interview for the Belgium “La Libre Belgique,” cited by the Bulgarian news agency BTA.

Rehn, who is currently the Commissioner-designate for Economic and Monetary Affairs, points out that the European Commission at the time had no right to impose a veto on the pre-accession negotiations.